Artist Spotlight: Andrew Maunders - 2012 Olympics Poster

With the 2012 Summer Olympics well underway in London, we have noticed that this particular poster has been rising in popularity.  London-based Behance designer Andrew Maunders originally created the poster with only the intent to boost his portfolio by freely distributing the image during the Olympic games.  As he was getting ready to print the posters, the official Olympic games committee approached him and gave him permission to distribute the poster as he pleased.  Together, they came up with the idea to sell the poster and donate all proceeds to a local charity that helps disabled children with sports.

Support the London 2012 Olympics with Fotomoto, no matter where you are: buy this poster and get the added bonus of helping children in need.

Updated Homepage

We are saying goodbye to the “Featured Artist” section of our homepage today.  We’ve stripped down our homepage to focus on our product, and we’re showing off our clients, our partners, and our supported platforms.  Unfortunately, with the featured artist on our homepage, we did not update often enough, so we are transitioning the featured artist to periodic spotlight posts on our blog.  This way, the spotlight will be updated more often and feature sites that are running and up to date.

Improved Payment System

In our new widget, we used to send buyers to a separate secure page for their credit card transaction.  As part of our new design, we are using an embedded secure page for accepting payment information, which helps buyers go through the entire process without leaving the seller’s site.  

Of course, all credit card information is safe and goes through a secure connection (even if the seller’s site is not secure).  Buyers still have the option to use a stand-alone secure page to enter their payment information.

This feature is enabled for all user starting today.

Fotomoto Widget 3.0

We have been working on the new version (v3.0) of our widget for a while now.  After testing it on selected websites for a couple of weeks, we are happy to announce the public release of the new widget to all users.

We have completely redesigned our widget. The photo preview area is now bigger, all products are accessible from the main window, selecting the crop-area is much more user friendly, check-out process is two-steps shorter, and the overall design is cleaner and more beautiful. Beside that the new design will let us reduce the number of toolbar buttons to a single “Buy” button (which will be coming soon!). 

New Print Product: High Quality Wall Peels

Wall Peels, Wall Murals, Sticky Prints, Self-adhesive Posters… these are all different names for the same product, a new product that we just started offering to our community.

Wall Peels have been around for a while, and we have wanted to add that to our product offerings from early days.  But after testing a good number of print labs, we realized the quality of this product was not good enough for our community.  The material most of the labs use for Wall Peels is a fabric that absorbs ink, which makes colors look dull - especially darker colors.  So we decided to wait, and test more labs.

A few months ago we finally found a great lab offering Wall Peels using a very good quality vinyl material.  We tested several photos, and they all came out with vivid colors.  Happy to have found the right product, we started integrating and adding this to our offerings.  Today we are happy to announce that we have added Wall Peels to our print product offerings!

There is virtually no limit to the Wall Peel print size.  Wall Peels are printed on 40”-wide roles of vinyl, and they can be applied to the wall right next to each other (just like wallpaper), so orders can be as big as almost any wall size.  Applying Wall Peels is very easy and needs no special equipment or expertise, almost anyone can do it in a few minutes.  We also offer something that most Wall Peel labs don’t have: we can offer Wall Peels as small as 8” x 8”.  And all of that comes at a very affordable price.

To enable this product in your store, simply log in to your Fotomoto account, go to Store, select the Collection you want, and turn on Wall Peels.

Behance Enhanced by Fotomoto

Behance is the latest company that has integrated Fotomoto into their platform and has made it available to its photographers and artists.

Behance’s core product is the Behance Network, the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. Creative professionals, from across industries, use Behance to create multi-media portfolios that showcase their work within the Network, as well as dozens of other partner sites and industry-specific, curated online galleries. Partners include LinkedIn, Art Directors Club, AIGA, TED, and others.

In addition to the Network, Behance offers Prosite. Leveraging the cutting-edge technology that supports the Behance Network platform, ProSite is a revolutionary new way to build, host, and manage your personal portfolio website. Tailored to the needs of the modern creative professional, ProSite allows users to create a fully customizable website, without touching a line of code. And, it seamlessly syncs your portfolio with the Behance Network for maximum efficiency and exposure.

With Fotomoto’s seamless integration in Behance Network’s platform, Behance Network and Prosite members now have the ability to sell prints of their portfolio content using Fotomoto. You can receive promotional pricing on the Prosite offering if you mention Fotomoto in the signup form.

Step-by-step instruction on adding Fotomoto to Behance accounts is here.

Cards & eCards Improvements

This week we have made a couple improvement to our Cards and eCards services.  For both products, you can now customize the credit and copyright text.  To do this, simply go to your Store > Collections, click on Card’s or eCard’s Settings, and customize the credit message.

Also, we used to have our full logo in color on the back of the cards.  Some members mentioned that this makes it look like their cards are from Fotomoto, and they were right.  So we have changed the logo to a smaller, black & white stamp-looking graphic. 

Improved eCard & Social Share

There have been some changes in Google’s social life: Google Buzz is out, and Google Plus is in.  While we were updating our Share feature to apply these changes, we thought we should improve the eCard service as well, cleaning up our eCard UI has been long overdue.

In our server update this week, we have combined the eCard and Sharing into one button and one window, simplified the eCard UI, and replaced Google Buzz with Google Plus.

Social sharing can now be turned on / off in the Dashboard under the eCard section.

Rolling Stone (and Facebook)

If you like music - any type of music - there is a good chance that you are a fan of Rolling Stone Magazine.  They have been publishing since the late 60s, and just looking at those covers can make you emotional.  It’s almost imposible not to want to hang some of those covers - old or new - in your room, or your office.  And now we are happy to announce that they are using Fotomoto to offer authentic reprints of their covers, both on their website, and on their facebook fan page!  

Very soon, you will be able to offer Fotomoto’s service to your fans on facebook too! 

Fotomoto Product Updates

We have been quiet here in our blog, but we have been busy working on a lot of improvements:

• We have completely redesigned and combined our Image and Products page and improved the way we handle product offerings and pricing. The new page, Store, is simpler, cleaner, and more streamlined.
• We changed the layout of the product pricing table in the Dashboard, organizing the product pricing section into tabs based on size groupings so it’s easier to manage.
• We have added a new way to manage images: Albums.  Albums are basically what you expect an album to be: a set (or subset) of the images.  This was an important feature for some of our future features, including the most-requested service, a Facebook integration app (we’ll have more on this soon!). 
• We’ve simplified the customer interface for Cards by removing the ‘fit’ option from our Widget. Images now fill the Card, and buyers can drag the image to achieve the desired crop if necessary.
• We added the ability for sellers to adjust the cropping of any image in the Dashboard > Orders page, so that you have the final say on what your image cropping looks like.
• To make ordering products even easier, we’ve simplified the shipping options so your customers can choose shipping options based on combinations of Standard and Express in Tube or Flat.
• And last but not least, we have been able to negotiate better shipping prices!  Our shipping prices are 5%-20% lower for most of the products and sizes.  Right on time for the shopping season.

As always, we welcome your feedback and comments in our Community.  We will be rolling out several new updates and products during the next couple of weeks, stay tuned.